This essay examines how medical rhetorics helped justify the recent torrent of anti-trans legislation. Beginning with the “legitimacy wars” between psychiatry and psychology, I trace how competing disciplines established their own expertise by denying trans patients’ agency and self-knowledge. After identifying the “trans trickster” trope that emerges from these rhetorics, I trace how the trans trickster haunts arguments used to ban gender-affirming health care and sports participation for trans youth. I draw from sociologist Ian Hacking’s “looping effects” to explain how medical logics affect public perception and how those understandings loop back into medical research. The binary, linear models of gender transition established by trans medicine helped justify cisnormative policies around transgender identity, which in turn restricted further scientific inquiry such that more imaginative gender formations remain illegible. To conclude, I argue that medical paradigms work in relation with trans imagination would expand scientific explorations of human diversity, and that those understandings too could loop through public policy and perception.

America’s individualistic culture is reflected in deeply held beliefs about how people should manage their health and their (lack of) money. In this essay, we trace the ideological discourse of individualism at macro and micro levels, explicating how macro-level discourses surrounding finances and health fulfill key functions of individualism: explanatory and evaluative as well as identity and prescriptive. For each function, we illustrate at the micro level how social adherence to discourses of individualism affects people, relationships, and communities. In particular, we argue, failure to live up to individualistic ideals fosters internalized shame and guilt and worsens mental, physical, and financial health. Grounded in critical rhetorical theory and drawing upon critical interpersonal and family communication and health communication approaches, we illustrate how individualistic discourse is circulated and taken up by people, constituting their identities and relationships. We also showcase the benefits of investigating exigent social issues from multidisciplinary vantage points.

The coronavirus pandemic has been widely experienced online, and the experience of COVID-19 vaccines is no exception. This article reports on a case study of social media writing authored by COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial participants as a new and innovative form of vaccine communication. Findings offer three insights about vaccine decision-making and communication: 1) vaccine refusal, confidence, and hesitancy are increasingly informed by individuals’ personal assessments of vulnerability and risk; 2) expressed vaccine hesitancy is characterized by openness to persuasion; and 3) this impressionable vaccine hesitancy can be productively addressed in spaces that bridge lived experience and medical expertise. Building on these insights, this article delineates strategies for meaningful and participatory online communication about vaccination.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease that progresses along a fluctuating course of changing capacities, affects approximately 5.7 million Americans, an estimate expected to skyrocket as the baby boomer generation ages. Adopting a rhetorical field methods approach I analyze the transcripts of qualitative interviews of 3 patients and 28 caregivers to understand how the chronicity of AD affects informal caregiving strategies as well as the lived experiences of persons with AD. Employing a new materialist framework along with rhetorical enactment theory, I posit chronicity as rhetorical action distributed not only among human and nonhuman agents but also across moments, requiring special attention to time and timing. I argue chronic illness is rhetorically enacted through three material-discursive practices: ontological practices that enact reality, alignment practices that facilitate or disrupt cooperation among entities, and mnemonic practices that enact and outsource memory among AD caregivers. Across all three kinds of practice, a material-discursive sense of kairos and chronos is advanced.

Our article uses case studies of two civilian emergency response mHealth apps—PulsePoint and OD Help—to theorize the ways the mobile mapping functionality embedded in these tools, which is integrated with the Google Maps platform, enables yet also constrains users’ agential practices. Using an interface rhetoric approach, we unpack assumptions related to the embodied contexts of use facilitated by this functionality within the unique scenario of civilian emergency response. We argue that interactions between and among humans and these apps’ mapping interfaces involve complex, negotiated, contextually situated enactments, which align with a posthumanist perspective toward agency. At the same time, these interactions may also inadvertently amplify the precarity of vulnerable groups. Better understanding the ways that mobile mapping technologies shape agential enactments, particularly in ways that affect precarious and dispossessed populations, has important implications for the design of mHealth technologies—and the users who rely on them—moving forward.

Contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) is the removal of both breasts when one is affected by cancer. Researchers and journalists typically attribute increased use of this controversial procedure to patient misunderstanding of breast cancer risk. Thus, efforts to curb CPM use focus on better patient education. I argue that such efforts are potentially ineffective insofar as they fail to recognize that risk isn’t just something that patients know but also something that they do, and that how they do it affects their healthcare decisions. I further argue that this failure can lead to impaired communication about CPM by perpetuating sexist stereotypes of women as too emotional to make good decisions. To improve communication, then, I draw on screening guidelines and public discourse about CPM to show how patients do breast cancer risk, arguing that they often experience a kind of overtreatment that makes CPM an effective, if unconventional, treatment choice.

This article examines the rhetorical effects of a rape accusation on the survivor and on the survivor’s community of social justice activists. Relying on interviews with the survivor and with the community affected by the allegation, the article analyzes responses to the allegation, articulates how those responses are informed by rape culture, and illustrates how those responses affected the survivor and her rhetorical agency. The article argues that rhetorical agency can be productively distributed across various allies to assist survivors and help restore the rhetorical agency that rape erodes. Establishing sexual assault as a public health issue, the article recommends broad education in rhetorical listening to improve how those entrusted to hear assault stories listen, respond, and, when appropriate, help survivors speak or act.

In April 2017, Minnesota experienced the state’s largest measles outbreak since 1990. The outbreak primarily affected Somali children and was attributed to declining vaccination rates in Minnesota’s Somali population, specifically. Examining empirical data from ethnographic interviews with Somali parents who experienced the outbreak, this article identifies four themes that shaped participants’ vaccination decision-making: 1) an experience-informed belief in vaccine effectiveness, 2) concerns about non-inclusive clinical research, 3) belief in personalized, flexible immunity, and 4) experiences of structural vulnerability. Findings show that race and ethnicity, migration history, and structural precarity in resettlement influence Somali parents’ vaccination decisions and should inform existing explanations for vaccine hesitancy and models for responsive public health outreach. Participants’ practices of vaccine hesitancy are often refusals: constrained and embodied acts of resistance and generative openings to collaboratively re-envision healthcare relationships and communication. Refusals can redirect public health efforts from vaccine compliance toward institutional change and resource redistribution as means of disease prevention. This possibility has yet to be fully explored, and this article uses rhetorical publics theory to study medical refusal as a public participation strategy.

When considering the material ecologies of the human body, we must consider the bodies within—at least five hundred known species of microbes. We propose the term gut rhetorics to highlight how our guts have become an environment to which we are exposed: a biologically active actant contributing to the physiology and psychology—the rhetorical capacities—of the human body. Gut rhetorics incorporate—bring into the body and, importantly, into the body of rhetoric—the hungry horde within human bodies. First, we trace one probiotic formulation across three scientific studies to show how bodies, affects, and microbes are being “calibrated” at the level of experiment. Second, we stress skilled probiotic experimentation and encourage scholars to play amid environments, give attention to embodiment, and pursue phenomenological inquiry (Gruber, 2018; Melonçon, 2018). Gut rhetorics consider bodies, affects, and microbiota as entangled metabolic intra-actions that affect how the world appears to the body and the body to the world.